( ESNUG 510 Item 9 ) -------------------------------------------- [04/11/13]
Subject: Does Cadence-Berkeley lawsuit mean some ADE users will be sued?
> The bad news for users is I hear Cadence has kicked Berkeley Design out of
> the Cadence partnership program so that Cadence can try to lock users into
> using only Spectre with the ADE cockpit for analog/RF design. Berkeley
> has been taking analog/RF sales from Cadence with their BDA AFS simulator.
>
> - from http://www.deepchip.com/items/0521-05.html
QUICK SUMMARY: Yesterday news broke that Cadence is suing Berkeley DA in US
district court for breach of contract of the Cadence Connections agreement
between BDA and Cadence; and for violating the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act -- by giving customers a "secretly developed" interface for BDA AFS into
Virtuoso ADE -- which bypasses the Cadence-licenced OASIS interface to ADE.
A Cadence spokesman issued this statement:
"Over many months before filing this lawsuit, Cadence made repeated
proposals to work with BDA's management to rectify this situation.
Cadence was, however, unable to persuade BDA to comply with its
contractual obligations under the Cadence Connections Program.
Consequently, Cadence did not renew BDA's participation in the
Connections Program.
Cadence is also seeking injunctive relief and damages for lost OASIS
license fees, among other relief.
The ability of companies to protect their intellectual property
is foundational to the industry. Cadence is committed to
interoperability with its business partners in order to provide
value to customers, and regrets that it has been left with no other
choice than to file this complaint.
Cadence remains fully prepared to support our common customers via
an authorized integration to BDA's products through a licensed
OASIS interface."
The response to this lawsuit from Ravi Subramanian, CEO of Berkeley DA:
"We believe Cadence's recent lawsuit has no merit. We do not
believe that we breached any agreement with Cadence nor violated
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
We support fair competition, including respect for intellectual
property rights.
Our tools are beating Cadence's tools, and customers are choosing
our products over Cadence's. Our accelerating momentum with
customers apparently prompted Cadence to reject our reasonable
efforts to continue to partner with them and provide customers
the best flow.
We strongly support customers' desires to build interoperable
design flows with best-in-class tools. And we believe everyone
in the EDA industry should support that goal, rather than
impede it.
What is Cadence really telling their customers about building
those best-in-class flows? And who exactly are these Does?"
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
  
ANALYSIS: Both companies pretty much followed the standard lawsuit playbook.
Cadence is a nice guy because it said it tried to talk this out with BDA
first, but it was "unable to persuade BDA to comply" -- implying that it
was forced to do this lawsuit as an act of last resort -- and they closed
with a patriotic appeal to the sanctity of protecting IP and to supporting
their mutual customers.
Berkeley countered as the classic angry victim with a non-nonsense direct
rebuke of Cadence's accusations; followed by a BDA patriotic appeal to the
sanctity of protecting IP, best-in-class flows, plus an explaination that
Cadence is *really* doing this because "Our tools are beating Cadence's
tools, and customers are choosing our products over Cadence's."
All the standard blah, blah, blah of big guy vs. little guy EDA lawsuits.
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
THE SCARY PART:
But what's scarey and unusual here is what Ravi asked in his last sentence:
"And who exactly are these Does?"
At first this appeared to be a throwaway closing comment, but it referenced
something I had to look up in the court filing:
"3. Defendants Doe 1 through Doe 25, inclusive ('The Does') are
sued herein under fictitious names. Their true names and
capacities are unknown to Cadence. Cadence will amend this
complaint to set forth their true names and capacities
when ascertained."
Wow! The name "John Doe" is a placeholder for an unknown person's name.
"Does" can be persons or even entire unknown companies. That is, Cadence
has left 25 empty placeholders where it can add customer's names to this
lawsuit as it so deems! (Think it out. If it's not customers, who else
would "The Does" be? BDA is already being sued, so it's not any of them.
The only other parties left to sue here are the customers.)
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
IT'S BEEN DONE BEFORE:
And before you poo-poo the idea of Cadence suing BDA customers as being
absurd, there have been recent precendences of exactly this in EDA.
In 2005, Synopsys threatened to sue Magma users during the SNPS-LAVA
patent lawsuit:
Q: Does Synopsys intend to pursue current Magma users?
A: Synopsys cannot comment on this. However, if we obtain the
injunctive relief we are seeking, Magma will no longer be able
to sell infringing products. Users would be infringing as well,
so clearly, Magma's misappropriation of technology exposes their
customers.
- Rex Jackson of Synopsys, Inc.
http://www.deepchip.com/items/0443-02.html
But Synopsys lost the SNPS-LAVA lawsuit, so they never followed through on
this threat.
Yet the infamous cantankerous Ivan Pesic of Silvaco actually did sue his
customers (and won!) after he caught them stealing his SW.
"This is not the law run amuck, John. These big guys like Intel,
AMD, and Cypress all whine in the press about China, India, and
other countries not respecting IP rights. At the same time, these
same people have no quarrel using my stolen code. And when I ask
them to pay for it, they told me to get lost!"
- Ivan Pesic of Silvaco International
http://www.deepchip.com/gadfly/gad050505.html
So if I was any one of 100+ BDA customers like: Qualcomm, Broadcom, NXP,
Panasonic, Samsung, UMC, Fujitsu, TSMC, LG Electronics, NEC, MindSpeed,
STmicroelectronics, Teledyne, Triad, Silicon Labs, SunPlus, Toshiba, or
ST-Ericsson, the first thing I'd do today would be to phone the biggest
Cadence bigwigs I knew and ask: "Are you suing me?"
- John Cooley
DeepChip.com Holliston, MA
Editor's Note: A copy of Cadence v BDA complaint filed on April 5th
in California Northern District Court is #68 in DeepChip Downloads.
Related Articles:
Berkeley AFS benchmarks 5x-10x faster than Cadence Spectre/APS
A second set of Berkeley AFS vs. Cadence Spectre/APS benchmarks
Magma financial calls confirm Synopsys SPICE losing to FineSim
Join
Index
Next->Item
|
|
